Recent searches
Search options
Administered by:
I don't think people understand just how much "data-driven advertising" is a fucking scam. For example, Facebook has known my date of birth for about 15 years, and pretty much every ad it serves is for activities explicitly for under 30s. I'm 38. It knows this.
Facebook knows I live in London, and has known this fact for more than a decade. It just loves to serve me ads for businesses in Birmingham, where it knows I don't live.
Google and the brand I bought it from know that I own a specific type of mattress. They know this because I googled it and came into the website and bought it. And yet, I get advertised that specific mattress, from that specific supplier.
This is going to be one of those threads that I wish Mastodon had a "turn off replies" features, so anyway before replying, please thoroughly read this and also know that I work in marketing so I have a decent grasp on how advertising works, which is how I can confidently say the entire thing is a fucking scam run by the stupidest people in the world. https://anotherangrywoman.com/2023/01/18/how-to-give-advice-on-the-internet-without-being-an-utter-menace/
I ended up blogging about this in much more detail because I think it's important we talk about this https://anotherangrywoman.com/2023/07/05/scams-upon-scams-the-data-driven-advertising-grift/
(not a rickroll, I promise)
A couple of people have been asking about how the whole ~stealing elections~ thing works in the context of this scam and I'm probably going to have to write a follow up working through that, but where I'm at is pretty much that Cambridge Analytica, etc, are very much in the category of their product is making people think they *could* and that the "microtargeting" was wildly, wildly overstated.
OK here we go, why the "stealing elections with microtargeting" thing is probably a grift, too https://anotherangrywoman.com/2023/07/06/can-you-steal-an-election-with-targeted-ads/
You say not a rickroll like that's a good thing.
@kingkaufman I feel it's a very obligatory disclaimer when posting any links remotely pertinent to infosec
@stavvers that being said, it's worth bearing in mind that back then (7 years ago) far more data scraping and targeting was legally permissible than for now. There's a reason why Meta locked down political adverts after 2016. So just because it's a scam now doesn't necessarily mean it was a scam back then.
IMO Cambridge Analytica and their ilk are part of the scam.
What makes the stealing elections thing work is not the sophistication of their technology, but the crudeness of the product they "sell". They never stole elections for any complex or sophisticated policies. Only for fascist demagouges.
Social Media can't create the desire for a special brand of mattres in people, but it can make them afraid and angry. That has always been enough to sell some people fascism.
@stavvers overstated?
there exists a real memory hole in the states about the G. W. Bush years, but there was a hilarious narrative that the Bush's chief campaign advisor Karl Rove was some kind of brain genius that could perceive these invisible demographic segments and zero in on them with direct mailing and phone calls.
and this was credulously accepted by *everyone*. after an election where that candidate quite famously got fewer votes and was essentially appointed to the presidency by the court.
@jackdaw_ruiz this entirely passed me by but completely fits the pattern of Evil Supervillain Genius and I bet he got a lot of grift work off the back of it
@jackdaw_ruiz I read the book Bush's Brain which is the story of Texas Politics in the 90s and how Rove drove it into the hell hole it is now. After one election one Democrat was committed suicide and another was in jail. It wasn't so much that he was a tenacious genius, it's that he is an asshole who just has to win at all costs.
@jackdaw_ruiz That whole reputation pretty much died on election night 2012, live on Fox News.
He was -- and is -- the nickname that G.W gave him: "Turd Blossom."
@stavvers thanks! this really changed my mind, I love it when someone does that!!